Ryan Lattanzio

The Bride! is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

Shlesinger’s leading performance has the stuff of a star-making turn, though the film isn’t distinctive enough from its peers and predecessors to match the actor’s obvious onscreen charisma.

The Gallerist is one of those movies where the actors are having all the fun, clearly enamored with the chance at working together, while they forget to let the audience in on the entertainment.

Charli’s version of herself, though, is a fascinating creation — self-deprecating, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope lasered onto a forming star. See this movie with a crowd of Charli’s friends and collaborators, and you’ll too be in on the joke.

The film’s anti-patriarchal thesis is a worthy one that feels oddly undeveloped given that it’s the entire point, the actors here merely reading lines from a script as pat as a canned solicitation to swipe right.

Though often lethargic and listless, Is This Thing On? does stir up a vivid portrait of the New York City underground comedy milieu, even when New York City as a character feels more like the afterthought it isn’t supposed to be.

This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest.

It’s not a thriller, it’s not really a comedy, and it’s unlikely to start a revolution despite a cruel jolt of a final shot.

It’s an overintellectualized script that reduces its characters to broad stand-ins and mouthpieces for hot topics, bizarrely retrograde, and a few beats behind the times in interrogating both the post-#MeToo context of how assault charges are handled, reacted to, and also in untangling a tricky identity politics inquiry that brushes against race and gender issues.

Hot Milk dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known.

The mythology of Bring Her Back is dizzyingly unclear and patched-together from what feel like studio notes commissioning both over-explication and also less of it, as if ambiguity alone can pass for scares. But the emotions and the performances in the present day are there.

There’s too much movie here, but isn’t that better than none at all? Patterson’s big swings in filmmaking transcend the occasional shakier sum of their parts.

The lurching between genres, whether horror or comedy or heartfelt father-daughter movie, becomes increasingly transparent and frustrating as the movie tries to win our hearts back over with sentimental weepie moments in the film’s last act.

Cave’s work here is weighed down by a tensionless Andrew Sodorski-penned script that lacks intrigue and takes about an hour and a half to get going. Then, the movie is over.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a flashy ode to the fairies and the radicals, the maricóns who’ve repurposed their oppression and media literacy into an outsize, fuck-if-I-care-what-you-think political identity. Yet there’s nothing revolutionary about the movie that contains them.

This version of Speak No Evil, despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, “Straw Dogs”-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material Tafdrup sought to avoid.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

The Order is one of those: yet another Movie We Need Now, but the director inadvertently makes the case that maybe we don’t.

The Crow is not a waste of talent or resources; worse, it just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

If there’s any takeaway from “Rob Peace” for the industry folks in the audience, it’s the leading-man power and charisma of Jay Will, who gives an overwhelmingly heart-open performance that makes you understand why everyone in his midst adored him, and how his life’s richness lent well to a best-selling biography.

At the core of it all, Juri’s performance is a marvel of coiled emotion and wide-eyed wonder at the world around her. It’s just that the film around her does a disservice to that performance.

Zippy at first with the charisma and verve of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie, before it way outstretches its welcome across multiple encores and a 132-minute running time, Fly Me to the Moon has the patina of a straight-to-streaming movie tossed into theaters due to a backend deal or to appease filmmakers.

This Diane Von Furstenberg is plenty engaging, but as a tribute to the woman who reinvented the modern dress, it doesn’t reinvent anything itself.

Costner is fully in traditionalist mode here, painting a quote-unquote sweeping American saga that feels like an expensive miniseries compressed into feature form.

There’s almost nothing about “Emilia Pérez” that’s conventional — until the movie unravels into a third-act bit involving a hijacking, guns, and a live human body in a trunk. Which is just a reminder of where Audiard’s head really rests all along.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

The feature, Parvu’s third, blends suspenseful procedural with family drama but is missing a key point of view: That of the victim, whose assault is a Trojan horse into the film’s more macro interest in how bigotry and conformity entwine, and how emotionally repressed adults deal with teen homosexuality when it hits close to home.